New Zealand cherry grower Mike Casey operates his entire orchard with electric machinery and has shared his financial numbers to show how his approach makes economic sense
There are plenty of stories of people who wanted a lifestyle change and set up a farm, but none quite like that of Mike Casey.
After moving to Sydney and developing a successful technology start-up, Casey returned to his native New Zealand to “reinvent himself” and set up a fully electric cherry orchard.
A fleet of 21 electric machines, including a four-wheel drive 1989 Hilux ute which he converted to being electric, is complemented by an array of other investments including solar and battery systems to power the fleet.
This is far from a novelty operation – with Casey’s farm in New Zealand’s Central Otago region producing roughly 10 million cherries every year from its 9,300 trees.
With his background in technology and computer science making him a detail-oriented person, every investment Casey has made on the farm is about crunching the numbers and analysing the return on investment.
He was a guest at last year’s National Renewables in Agriculture Conference in Bendigo, where he told the story of how his farm came about and why he believes his efforts can be replicated on both sides of the Tasman.
Unusual path
Casey’s journey into agriculture has not been a traditional one.
After growing up in the New Zealand capital of Wellington, he got a computer science degree before moving to Sydney, where he spent 12 years and developed a website for students looking for their first job after university.
Selling this gave him enough capital to return to New Zealand with his young family, choosing the Central Otago region which he loved and had travelled to every year to ski.
“I’m an entrepreneur who loves a new opportunity and I needed to reinvent myself, start a new chapter and figure out what I wanted to do next,” he says.
“I was looking for houses and found a farm with the perfect house on it with nine hectares of spare land for the same price as a four-bedroom home in Wanaka or Queenstown.”
Combined with his wife Rebecca’s background as a chief financial officer, the couple realised they had found a bargain and Electric Cherries from Forest Lodge Orchard was born.
Unique fleet
Casey is a firm believer in the quality of New Zealand cherries, with the majority of the farm’s 10 million per year being exported to Asian markets.
Despite this quality, he knows the orchard has instead become best known for the fact it is powered by 21 electric machines.
“Absolutely everything on our farm is electric – we don’t use a single drop of diesel or a single ounce of gas,” he says.
“We have orchard utility vehicles such as custom golf carts, and in New Zealand we still don’t have a purely electric four-wheel drive ute yet, so we made one.
“That is a 1989 Hilux that I had a lot of fun converting in the farm shed.”
Casey’s commitment to using electric machinery extends to the large scale as well, even innovating to ensure emerging technology could still be used.
“We had the southern hemisphere’s first commercial electric tractor and we made an electric foliage sprayer to go on the back of that tractor,” he says.
“It runs off a 32-amp caravan plug rather than the PTO on the back of the tractor and uses about 15 per cent of the energy to do the same job, which at the end of the day means that I can run my entire orchard spraying operation on a single charge of that tractor.
“Every year Mainfreight lends us an electric truck to take our fully electric cherries on an electric journey down to the fully electric packhouse.
“No fossil fuels are used in any part of this until we’re ready to ship them out into the big wide world.”
Other electric machinery includes lawnmowers, cars and forklifts, along with power tools and irrigation pumps.
Electric Cherries from Forest Lodge Orchard also runs fully electric frost fighting fans, which were imported from South Africa and which Casey says are the first in New Zealand.
These cost about $9 per hour to run with electricity, as opposed to “hundreds of dollars an hour” when powered by diesel.
Casey acknowledges that Australian farmers face some different challenges to those in New Zealand but highlights a considerably higher solar uptake in Australia as being one area where this country is already ahead.
Beyond just agriculture, he says about 10 million machines are powered by fossil fuels in New Zealand – numbers sourced after extensive research by his team – with an estimated 700,000 of these being what he considers not ready to electrify.
“We always spend time focusing on the big machines, like our 250 horsepower tractors, and explaining why it is that we cannot electrify our farms,” he says.
“I recently had a neighbour of mine who is a land excavator talk about driving a 20-tonne electric excavator in Australia and just how it was an amazing experience.
“Maybe it might not be long before these electric excavators move into the 1 million machines in New Zealand that are almost ready to electrify – or machines that you have to go out of your way to electrify.
“There are also 8.5 million machines that are ready to electrify right now and I can put my hand on my heart and tell everyone in New Zealand – you are never better off buying a fossil fuel machine again. That is pretty exciting.”
On a mission
Casey is steadfast in his view that electrifying a farm is economically viable rather than just fanciful, and prides himself on being open with all his finances to prove this.
“I am very transparent with my numbers because transparency breeds trust,” he says.
“I have published absolutely every last cent that we have spent on our electrification journey to prove a point that New Zealand is now far more economical to go down this path than it is to look at continuing to run on foreign-sourced fossil fuels.”
Casey says the capital outlay on his 21 electric machines was $400,000 more than purchasing diesel equivalents, with some government grants enabling him to reduce the payback period on these from 13 years down to eight.
Grid electricity in New Zealand is about one-third the price of diesel on a usable kilowatt hour basis, he adds, which means that while his electricity bill does rise, the overall net spend on energy goes down significantly.
“With our solar, when we finance it on our farm mortgage at about 5.5 per cent, we have got that payback down to around about 5.5 years, which is pretty remarkable when you think about it, because these solar panels are going to last 25 to 30 years,” he says.
Casey also estimated the annual diesel costs for his 21 machines would be about $50,000, which would be more than halved to about $20,000 by going electric and running off the national grid.
By adding solar panels on his farm shed roof, then further increasing their size with more panels, and supplementing it with battery power, he has been able to turn fuel costs into a net profit.
“I think I am going to turn a $50,000 diesel bill to probably a $40,000 electricity revenue stream this year.
“On a farm that will make about $250,000 of profit in a good year, you can see how much of a betterment of the economics of my farm this has become,” he says.
“It’s like adding about 3,300 additional trees.”
Casey acknowledges there will always be a percentage of farmers who are cynical and do not want to electrify their farms.
His focus is instead on ensuring farmers who are interested – and who see the economic benefits in doing so – are not faced with further impediments.
“We just need to make sure that all the other farmers have the ability that they want to be able to do this,” he says.
“In New Zealand, with irrigation and with dairy sheds today, we are incredibly high energy users, particularly electricity users, and this is a really good opportunity to start saving on farm input costs when these just keep going up and up.
“That is an important thing to add – I’m not just asking farmers to do this out of their good graces.
“I’m asking them to do it because it’s in their financial best interest to do it.”
